Lillie Langtry

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Lillie Langtry - 'Jersey Lillie' - born, a provincial in 1853, was catapulted by her beauty into the highest society London had to offer. Surrounded by scandal, luxary and gossip, she bacame the mistress of the Prince of Wales, the goddess of Bohemia and the proteg�e of Oscar Wilde. After four years, she disappeared, bankcrupt, and pregnant with an illegitimate child. When she resurfaced, guided by Wilde, it was with the masks of several new and invented selves for protection. This book attempts to unravel her complex fictions about herself, to find the person behind the actress, gambler and iconoclast that she then became. At its centre are the previously unpublished letters which she wrote to her childhood friend and secret lover, Arthur Jones, during her period of crisis and collapse. Despairing, fervent and pathetically dependent, these letters reveal a passionate woman for whom the usual charges of coldness and opportunism are by no means the whole story. She died, broken in spirit but world-famous and a millionaire, in 1929. Laura Beatty captures exactly the spirit of the age, and lifts the masks to reveal the real Lillie.

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LAURA BEATTY lives in the middle of Salcey, one of the very few remaining medieval hunting forests in England. The forest, she says, has provided us with food, forage, fuel, materials for building and transport – yet it is also the place where we keep our bogeys, where witches live, and where characters go in ‘and come out wiser or sadder or dead or different’. Laura Beatty is married with three children. She is the author of a biography of Lillie Langtry.